In 2013, the world's first artificial hamburger, the test tube hamburger, was cooked and tasted. Following this event, many rumors appeared in the press about artificial meat, they say, soon we will not have to kill animals for food at all. The idea arose that in every local shop there would be an artificial chicken and bacon from a test tube. But in reality everything was not so: the era of such food is infinitely far from the current reality. Yes, the concept has been proven. The idea is great. But who develops it?
And why would someone suddenly want to eat meat from a test tube?
Our current system of meat consumption is working extremely poorly. It is unstable in the long term: today we use 30% of the ice-free land of the Earth to feed the animals that provide us with protein. The livestock sector produces about 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, the current system offers too many opportunities to harm us: E. coli, Salmonella, antibiotic resistance, eutrophication, loss of biodiversity and air pollution are just a few on a long list.
So if we want meat, why can't we grow it? Why produce a whole living organism as an ineffective mediator?
Artificial meat offers a safer, healthier, and more killing-free meat option that is 100% identical to our regular meat. Its production technology will have less harmful effects on the environment (otherwise why use it, right?), Reduce the need for scarce fresh water, land and fuel, and at the same time reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the problem with antibiotics.
Not to mention the expected improvement in overall efficiency.
As an example, startup Memphis Meats plans to bring artificial meat to market and use just three input calories to produce one calorie of meat. This would be an important improvement over the conventional system, which the startup claims uses 23 calories to produce one calorie of beef.
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The status quo
One would think that this area with so much potential - to fix our not-so-great meat production system - is well funded and supported by billionaires, and also at the federal level. But this is absolutely not the case.
Today, much of the artificial meat work is supported by New Harvest, a tiny, donated research institute with four full-time employees. Despite all the difficulties, they are the ones that drive this area forward:
- Organize the first conference on the so-called cellular agriculture
- Fund the development of cultured chicken and turkey
- Financed the first research on the creation of artificial steak
These accomplishments are great, but there are many challenges to commercializing the idea. Overcoming these problems will accelerate the emergence of cultured meat, transform it from an idea into a product.
Here are four things we must do to make the cultured meat age a reality.
Funding for fundamental research
There are two main scientific problems that we must solve.
a) provide cell lines for researchers
Nowadays, researchers in the medical space have easy access to most of the required cells; they just open catalogs and order as needed. This is only possible because banks of different cell types have been created in the past. There are no such banks for cultured meat. Thus, any researcher who wants to work on cultured meat must create a cell line directly from the animal, which is a complex and time-consuming process.
Just as you don't expect a programmer to write an operating system before building applications, we need to lower the barrier for cultured meat researchers by providing cell lines. Work on this has already begun. Professor Paul Mozdzyak of the University of North Carolina and his graduate student Mary Gibbons received funding from New Harvest to create a turkey cell line earlier this year.
By laying the foundations adequately, we create an enabling environment for researchers to focus their brain power, time, and creativity on this daunting task of creating cultured meat products instead of tinkering with cell lines.
b) development of an inexpensive serum-free cell growth medium
To grow animal cells outside of an animal, it is necessary to simulate the habitat inside the animal. Today, this requires the use of fetal calf serum, a complex broth of proteins and growth factors that, ironically, comes from the blood of a dead calf. Beyond the obvious ethical issue, EFV is expensive, varies from batch to batch, and can potentially be a source of pollution.
A stable, inexpensive, ethically sound alternative to ETS is essential if we want cultured meat to be competitive with conventional meat. Scientists have been looking for a replacement for ETS for many years. For major breakthroughs, serious funding is needed.
Funding engineering efforts
We need engineers who can build assistive technologies for the development of cultured meat. The opportunities are enormous, so all major engineering sub-areas will be involved.
Today we need:
- Chemical engineers and biochemists to create efficient bioreactors that can scale up profitable production.
- Tissue engineers who can create biodegradable scaffolds on which cells will grow and hold.
Tomorrow we need:
- Electromechanics for the precise design of control systems. This is especially important as cells will only thrive under carefully controlled conditions.
- Civil engineers to design and manage the construction of processing plants that will house bioreactors.
- Mechanical engineers to design, build and test new systems for mixing oxygen in bioreactors that will ensure an even distribution of oxygen throughout all cells.
Turn this field into an academic discipline
Obviously, we need more money and more brains to grow our knowledge base. This dozen academics who are currently - around the world - working on cell agriculture, this is not enough. We need to turn this area into an academic discipline. In the beginning, this may entail:
- Introductory courses and seminars at the university level.
- The emergence of a central open scientific journal that will contain all research in this area.
- Development of a curriculum for obtaining an academic degree and, ultimately, the creation of departments.
- Encouragement of interdisciplinary projects, student clubs, meat farming competitions.
Open the world of cultivated meat for everyone
People want to know what they eat and how that food is produced. But these days, the meat production system is invisible to most of us. Many of us have never been to farms that produce meat, which we then consume. Our love for meat keeps us blissfully unaware.
The more openness and collaboration the science of meat cultivation can offer, the faster we can enjoy it. You need to move.
Cultured meat promises to help us see the world in a new way. Abundance and stability may well not be mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to artificial meat. Very soon we will look back and be amazed at how ineffectively, uncontrollably, millions, billions of livestock were destroyed. We'll blame ourselves for not thinking about it earlier. After all, the world of the future will not tolerate excess. It will be precisely calculated in everything: in the treatment of precisely delivered drugs to the affected area, in the consumption of electricity, in the management of road transport. Meat is no exception.
ILYA KHEL